Gotta Have It

We love a cult online beauty brand at Muddy and this week we’ve been having a play with Beauty Pie‘s cornucopia of luxe skin care. These Superactive Capsules are like morning Berocca for the face – each one dispenses a shot of vitamins C and E for all your firming, smoothing and brightening needs. They help make-up to float on like a dream, are ideal if you’re going to the gym or travelling, plus they’re biodegradable (fashioned from red seaweed, apparently) so no planet-wrecking plastics are involved.

Also highly recommended is the Advanced Serum-Infusion Biocellulose Sheet Mask. It’s a lot easier to use than it is to say – you whack it on to clean skin for 15 minutes to allow the skin-plumping serum to soak in to your skin, before you peel it off. The downside is you look like Hannibal Lecter – it’s not a sexy bedtime look, believe me – but, wowzers, it works. I did one last night and my skin looks perkier today than it has done in many a moon.

And the best bit? The capsules are just £8.61 for a jar of 60 and the sheet masks £13.68 for five. This is because Beauty Pie is a subscription service – the Netflix of beauty, basically. You pay a monthly membership fee of £10 (for a minimum of three months) and then can buy products – created in the best beauty labs around the world – at cost price. Normally the capsules retail at £50 and the masks £55, so the savings are huge, up to 85 percent in some cases. The woman behind it is Marcia Kilgore, who, it’s fair to say, knows a good idea when she has one – the serial entrepreneur previously launched Bliss spas, playful bath brand Soap & Glory and shoe line FitFlop.

Do take a look at the scented candles too, a steal at £12 and great for gifts, the make-up brushes and the make-up itself. To get around the obvious problem of buying foundation online, there’s a clever little tool that shade matches you when you tell it your existing foundation brand and colour. Once you’ve paid your fees, the outlay on each product is so minimal (mascara for £2.32!) that it encourages you to experiment, play and step outside of your beauty comfort zone. Which can only be a good thing, no?